More than two months before the FBI raided the homes of Albuquerque Police Department DWI officers and the office of a local defense attorney, the Second Judicial District Court alerted oversight agencies to possible “questionable conduct” of one of the officers.
In early November, Katina Watson, the Court Executive Officer of the Second Judicial District Court, notified the Civilian Police Oversight Agency and the Disciplinary Board of the New Mexico Supreme Court that one of the court’s former employees had a concerning exchange with an officer when he was arrested for DWI in August.
“We did not question or conduct any sort of internal investigation; however, we have been alerted that there may be questionable conduct by the arresting/citation officer,” Watson wrote in a letter to the CPOA. “More specifically, that the arresting/citation officer put Mr. Barron in contact with a specific attorney, possibly named ‘Rick,’ who if hired, would ensure that no court case would be filed in court by APD.”
The officer who made the arrest was Honorio Alba. The Albuquerque Journal has reported that the home of Clear’s paralegal, Ricardo “Rick” Mendez, was also raided by the FBI.
“While we do not have first-hand knowledge of what communications and actions have taken place, we are reporting this information out of concern,” Watson wrote.
Alba, along with three other officers—Joshua Montano, Harvey Johnson, and Nelson Ortiz and a supervisor—are being investigated by the FBI along with defense attorney Thomas Clear. No charges have yet been filed.
Diane McDermott, the Interim Executive Director of the CPOA, said that her investigators had just begun working on the case and made a couple of calls when APD let her know that there was a “bigger investigation that they had going.”
“They basically didn’t give me any details about it, just ‘stop what you’re doing and transfer it,’” McDermott said.
If a matter may result in charges the CPOA and the Internal Affairs are directed to “regularly confer and coordinate” their investigations so as to avoid interfering with a criminal investigation. McDermott said CPOA investigators usually do some preliminary work to determine if a complaint has merit and that’s what they were doing when APD personnel contacted them.
The former court employee, a certified court monitor, was pulled over in August for driving while intoxicated. According to a citation, the 25-year-old was going 83 miles an hour in a 55 mile per hour zone with his headlights and tail lights off. He failed to stay in his lane multiple times, nearly struck a vehicle, drove over the sidewalk and had “bloodshot watery eyes and an odor of alcohol emanating from facial area,” Alba wrote.
The citation was not filed in court until November 13, 2023—ten days after CEO Watson sent in a complaint. It’s unclear why it was delayed.
The case was ultimately dismissed on January 18 “in the interest of justice,” along with more than 150 others that had been handled by Alba, Montano, Johnson and Ortiz.
A spokesperson for the District Court said “we believe the letter to CPOA speaks for itself.” She said the employee was with the court from April 2019 to the end of September 2023. He could not be reached.
